Short story: England and My Clan by Yan Lianke

The Chinese author, Yan Lianke, brings our short story relay to a close with a reflection on conflict across continents and down the generations, England and My Clan

'These were the words that prompted me to slip out of my hotel, alone and unnoticed, on the night before my departure' ... passenger pods of the London Eye move past a full moon. Paul McErlane / Reuters

Yan Lianke

Monday 22 March 2010 08.02 EDT
First published on Monday 22 March 2010 08.02 EDT

For the people of my clan, the British Empire is a gob of phlegm, a mouthful of sputum that can never be expelled.

Witness my paternal grandfather. Until the day he died at the age of ninety-two, he reacted to the mere mention of England, that distant western isle, like it was a foul stench at the door of a public toilet. Every time he invoked her name, he would turn his head, utter a curse – Bah! – and spit viciously upon the ground.

Before making my first trip to England, I decided to return to my hometown and pay a visit to my elderly grandfather. My father works in the city, but my mother has spent her entire life in our small coastal village, tending to the land and caring for grandpa. Even in my childhood, grandfather had seemed ancient: a gnarled scholar-tree crooked of limb, bent of posture, wrinkled with age. Each day found him hobbling along the village streets on his curved walking stick, taking in the sea-salt air and chatting to the other villagers. He was equal parts museum specimen and repository of memory, an illustrated local history come to life. Grandpa could talk about anything under the sun, for as long as anyone was willing to listen. He particularly enjoyed discoursing about an England that none of the villagers had ever seen and about the big-nosed, blue-eyed Englishmen that no one in the village – at least no one still alive – had ever met.

When I was a boy, grandpa would pat my head, point to the distant, winding mountains and tell me about the locomotives that used to tunnel beneath them en route to the village docks. Loaded down with gold and copper ore from nearby mines and emitting puffs of white smoke, the trains brought their cargo to the great ships that lay at anchor – waiting, grandpa said, to ferry our national treasure to the far corners of their wretched, god-damned British Empire. He claimed that the belching smokestacks of the British steamers towered so high that seabirds, unfamiliar with the foreign craft, would often fly right into them and smash their skulls in.

There was integrity in the way those birds died, grandpa said. A moral for the Chinese people.

But when he reached the moral of the story, grandpa seemed to run out of steam. He recalled sadly how his own grandfather, an opium-smoking northern Chinese merchant who founded the village's first copper mine, eventually sold it to a British trader to finance his habit. After that, my great-great-grandfather proceeded to smoke up the family fortune, signing away the deeds to the houses and storefronts that lined both sides of our street. One by one, the keys to our properties fell into the hands of others. As the port expanded and the mountain's belly was emptied of its ore, my great-great-grandfather's holdings continued to dwindle until our once-wealthy and illustrious family – a clan that had been a credit to its ancestors – was reduced to living in a ramshackle courtyard. After selling off his last horse cart, a vehicle he had used for decades to transport copper ore from the mines, my great-great-grandfather hightailed it to the nearest opium den to smoke away what was left of his body and soul. Upon returning home, he hung himself from the crossbeam of his own front gate.

* * *

Over two decades ago, before I left for university in Beijing, grandpa took me by the hand and led me into the street outside our house. Pointing to a building that had once housed a dye-works, he told me, "If your great-great-grandfather hadn't been an opium addict, that place would still be ours." Then, gesturing to what had once been a general store: "If the British hadn't come to China to sell their opium, that building would belong to us." Waving a hand down the avenue that had once been the glory of our family, grandpa cursed, "Damn those big-nosed bastard sons of bitches!" then stamped his foot, turned his head and spat.

Later, as we stood atop an old stone bridge, grandpa pointed to a range of mountains barely visible in the distance. "There, that's where the mines were. See that highest peak? The railway used to pass right under it."

I gazed in the direction grandpa had pointed and found nothing but fields, mountains, valleys and the damp sea air. Unsure what to say, I asked rather foolishly, "Do you ... hate England?"

Grandpa looked at me with surprise, and it seemed, a glimmer of hope.

"You know what this family's greatest regret is?" he asked with a bitter laugh, tousling my hair. "Not that that your great-great-grandfather smoked opium, or that the English carted off all our gold and copper. It's that none of us has ever had the chance to stab an Englishman in the heart."

* * *

I went back to my hometown three days before boarding the flight to England. Because the day's catch was brought in live, the village streets were lined with basins of fresh seafood and fish thrashing about in their tanks, but the smell in the air was one of rotting fish, the stench of death and decay. Over the last two decades, most of the old buildings and warehouses owned by our family a century ago had been demolished, swept away by the winds of change. Their replacements – high-rise apartment blocks and modern shopping centres – boasted nearly identical facades of glass and white ceramic tile. It was as if our ancient village, our ancient nation, had been repackaged entirely in plate-glass and sanitary porcelain.

Fortunately, our courtyard home of weathered, rough-hewn stone was still intact. It stood, like a cultural relic, beneath the shade of several large trees on the eastern end of the village. My ninety-two-year-old grandfather, now a cultural relic himself, occupied a place of honour in our courtyard, in the room in which he had been bedridden for the last three years.

When I informed him that I was going to England, his bleary eyes seemed to brighten, although he continued to stare at me as if I were a stranger. Eventually, with the aid of the bright sunlight streaming through the window, he seemed to recognise the man standing at his bedside as his eldest grandson, the one who had gone to Beijing and stayed there, and who now spent his days writing fiction.

"Where'd you say you were going?" grandpa asked.

"To England."

It took another round of this question-and-answer to convince grandpa that I was telling the truth, that I really was going to England. As realisation dawned, the colour drained from his face, and his features turned rigid and death-like. It was as if the old man propped against the headboard were not a person at all, but a bloodless wax statue. He sat like that for a long time, unmoving. The moments ticked by.

Then, slowly, he twisted his body and reached for the shelf above his bed. I could hear his joints creaking, as if his body were a rusted machine that had lain idle for too long. Taking a red sandalwood box from the shelf, he drew from it a smaller box made of the same material. It was about eight inches in length, two inches high and two inches wide.

He grasped my hand and placed it over the box. Eyes glinting and lips trembling, grandpa spoke: "Finally, someone in our clan is going to England. For generations, we've passed down the same dying wish: that someday, one of us will have the chance to stab an Englishman in the heart."

Grandpa suffered from tremors. His hands twitched like guttering candles, and the ancient veins on the back thrummed like the strings of a zither. To this accompaniment, I heard him echoing the voices of our ancestors, bequeathing me a feud that had been passed down for over a century: "You're going to their country now, to England, and it's your duty ... drive this dagger into their English hearts!"

* * *

My visit to England lasted all of ten days.

Besides a speech at the London South Bank Centre's China Now festival and a lecture and literary round table organised by the Cambridge University Department of East Asian Studies, most of my activities in London revolved around cultural exchange and sightseeing. I sampled authentic British cuisine, stayed at a three-star hotel and went on outings accompanied by a professional interpreter, my esteemed literary translator, my publisher and editor. I also met a talented British couple – a poet and novelist, respectively – who lived with their two young children on a country estate near Stonehenge. As their guest, walking among those imposing stone monoliths, I experienced a physical and cultural landscape unlike any I'd known in China. Later, they took me on a guided tour of London's museums, art galleries and cathedrals, with stops at Chinatown, the tomb of Karl Marx and the former residence of Marx's close friend and compatriot Fredrick Engels. In short, I did all the things a typical first-time Chinese visitor to London does: I oohed and aahed, snapped photos and purchased souvenirs. The only difference was my grandfather's voice, echoing always in the back of my mind: "You're going to their country now, to England, and it's your duty ... "

These were the words that prompted me to slip out of my hotel, alone and unnoticed, on the night before my departure. The city lay in darkness, her residents fast asleep. I wandered the streets, gazing up at the buildings that had inspired centuries, even millennia, of awe and obeisance; I stepped across weathered, pockmarked cobblestones, worn by the passage of many feet, and made my way toward the Thames. London's broad avenues had none of the rotten, fishy stench of my hometown, nor the earthy scent of fields and trees particular to northern China. Between the damp marine air and the moisture rising from the Thames, I thought I caught a whiff of decaying brick and chiseled stone, the engraved aftermath of ages. Now and then, a taxicab would pass along the street, or a group of teenagers, headed home after a night of revelry or romance. Was it my imagination, or did they slow as they approached, fix me with hostile stares, as if my foreignness, my otherness, invited distrust?

And so it went, until I reached an old stone bridge spanning the River Thames. From my perch on the railing, I could see the giant ferris wheel – which I had been told was known as the London Eye – on the opposite bank. I must have sat like that for ages, staring into the eye and thinking, until my thoughts were interrupted by a young Middle-Eastern girl selling roses. She seemed to have come out of nowhere. She waved one of her last bunches in front of my face and asked if I wanted to buy them. I slowly stood up from the railing.

There, in the light of a street lamp, communicating with gestures, I told the girl that I wanted to buy all the flowers she had left. When I had paid for them and she had left, I stood at the top of the bridge and began tossing the roses, one by one, into the dark waters below. I leaned over the railing and watched them float away, disappearing into the Thames, their fragrance still ripe in my nostrils. As their outlines grew fainter, red petals turning black, they seemed to me like tiny covered boats on a rain-spattered Chinese river.

* * *

Shortly after I left for England, my grandfather died.

He passed away at the age of ninety-two, peacefully, in his sleep. By the time I had returned to Beijing and arranged a flight to my hometown, grandpa had already been buried on a high mountain peak, the same one he had pointed out to me as a boy. The mountains meandered along the coast in one long, unbroken chain. To the west lay the vast and boundless ocean; to the east, our once-vibrant little village. And deep beneath those rugged mountains, the subterranean passages the British had built, and the copper mines they'd stripped bare and abandoned.

Amidst that mountainous terrain, that storied landscape, was grandpa's grave. It was an ordinary, humble grave, a heap of yellow soil upon which grass had not had time to grow.

I sat at the foot of my grandfather's grave, holding the narrow sandalwood box he had given me on the eve of my trip to England. Inside that coffin-shaped box was a dagger encased in a leather sheath. I'd been told that after his father's suicide, my great-grandfather had roamed the village, mines and wharves with this same dagger, hell-bent on killing an Englishman or two. In the end, he came away empty-handed, either because he couldn't locate any Englishmen, or because he couldn't bring himself to do the deed. Years later, on his deathbed, great-grandfather had left the weapon and the feud in the hands of his son, my grandfather.

Decades later, grandpa would pass them on to me, with the words: "You're going to their country now, to England, and it's your duty ... " But instead of keeping the dagger, I hid it in a corner of the old family home and lied to grandpa. "Don't worry," I told him, "I'll take it with me to England. And I won't let it make the trip in vain." On hearing these words, Grandpa pinched my hand affectionately and closed his eyes.

The night I left for England, he passed away in his sleep.

He left this world satisfied and serene.

As I sat at my grandfather's grave – breathing in the scent of the sea from miles away, gazing at the village that had once contained so much of our family's wealth, and cradling a red sandalwood box that held an ancient dagger and a rusted feud – I felt like I should write a story. A work of historical fiction, a tale of the enmity and amity between my family and a faraway country. I even gave it a title: "England and My Clan."

 Translated from the Chinese by Cindy M Carter

 Yan Lianke is the author of Serve the People and the Dream of Ding Village, due to be published in March 2011

 The China Reflected series is published with the generous support of Arts Council England

As the Olympic torch passes from China to the UK, we're launching a grand exchange of our own, with a relay of short stories inspired by writers' journeys between the two countries. Hari Kunzru who travelled to China earlier this year, kicks off with the tale of an uncomfortably close encounter with pandas